Skychain will provide an open infrastructure based on blockchain principles to facilitate the development, training, and using of medical neural networks. Skychain’s goal is to enable easy transactions between these four groups of participants: providers of healthcare big data required for neural network training; developers of neural networks for medical diagnostics; doctors and patients interested in accurate diagnoses made by artificial intelligence systems; and crypto miners interested in making a profit from their computational resources.

The project aims at building a system that will be far superior to any competitive products since it will be based on a unique approach and have a unique architecture.

Skychain’s value for market players

The Skychain project cares about social and humanitarian values. There are 7.5 billion people in the world, and more than 6 billion of them can’t get a medical diagnosis of an early disease due to a lack of access to high-quality healthcare services. Millions of lives are lost every year for that reason. Our project aims at providing high-quality medical diagnostics for patients by allowing their doctors and nurses to use artificial intelligence systems.

Skychain will be beneficial to doctors and patients in advanced nations. It will boost the doctors’ productivity by automatically checking their patients’ test and examination results and bringing the doctors’ attention to important details that are often overlooked due to a lack of time.

Skychain will be beneficial for insurance companies. It will provide an independent “third opinion” for the diagnoses of the patients whose treatment is covered by the insurance policy.

Skychain vs. other similar blockchain projects

A close examination of blockchain projects like SingularityNET, SONM, and Golem shows that none of them stands a chance in the medical artificial intelligence market as they don’t address its major problems.

For example, if you want to develop a medical neural network for the SingularityNET system, it will be difficult, but not because of a lack of neural network training infrastructure. SingularityNET also doesn’t provide an AI Marketplace, but that’s not the major problem, either. The major problem is that you need a huge amount of data (“big data”) to train your medical neural network. The question is, where can you get healthcare big data? If you are a corporate giant like IBM, you could probably fork out some $1.5 billion for the big data to train your neural network. But most companies don’t follow that approach since it would mean a loss of their investment in data acquisition or licensing. Besides, 99.99% of all neural network developers don’t have deep pockets like IBM.

Skychain’s Data Marketplace will allow many healthcare data providers to provide their datasets as a service for neural network training.

The neural networks trained on such datasets will only be used in the Skychain system to guarantee that the data providers will get their share of the profits generated by training neural networks on their datasets;

Preparing medical datasets for neural network training will become a profitable business for healthcare data providers.

The Skychain project cares about the intellectual property of medical neural network developers and healthcare data providers. No third parties will be able to access any trained neural networks or any datasets used for their training.

Skychain will allow the best artificial intelligence specialists to quickly develop neural networks and train them on huge amounts of healthcare data that no company, organization, or nation could ever accumulate. As a result, both the spectacular number of neural networks in the Skychain system and their high quality will be beyond the reach of any private or public project.

That kind of approach and architecture will create a unique ecosystem that will allow healthcare data providers interested in making a profit from their big data to meet with artificial intelligence system developers who need a lot of data to train their neural networks. That’s why Skychain is going to capture the medical artificial intelligence market where other blockchain projects we know of would fail.

Skychain vs. big corporate projects (IBM Watson)

Corporate giants are aiming at the artificial intelligence market in the healthcare industry, estimated to reach $200 billion in 5 years. But they are going to fail as their approach is very ineffective. Let’s use IBM as an example.

In short, IBM’s approach is “buy everything and capture the market.” But that kind of approach will not work in this case.

IBM understands the importance of healthcare big data for neural network training, so it has gained access to 100 million patient cards by acquiring Truven Health Analytics, a leading provider of cloud-based healthcare data and analytics, for $2.6 billion. According to some experts, it would take IBM an investment of about $137 billion in healthcare big data if it wants to allow Watson to develop properly. But even a behemoth like IBM can’t afford that kind of outlay! So the expensiveness of data becomes the limiting factor for medical neural network training.

Skychain will overcome that limitation. Both neural network developers and healthcare data providers will benefit from joining the Skychain ecosystem. Neural network developers will get a reward each time their neural networks are accessed by Skychain’s end users, and data providers will get a reward each time any neural network trained on their datasets is accessed by end users.

The second problem that Watson has run into is its dogmatism. Watson was taught to recognize and treat cancer only by the healthcare professionals of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center (New York, NY), so all of its decisions regarding the diagnosis and the treatment regimen are based exclusively on the concepts and therapies adopted in that medical institution. It became a stumbling block when IBM Watson Health tried to sign contracts with other medical institutions whose doctors hated the idea that they would have to use such a limited system of concepts!

Unlike Watson, Skychain ensures medical pluralism by hosting a lot of independent neural networks trained on a large amount of healthcare data. The important thing is that Skychain will automatically check the quality and accuracy of each neural network before offering the end user a choice of neural networks pre-selected based on their ratings for specific diagnostics.

The third problem of IBM Watson is that it already lags behind in technology. The open community of neural network developers thrives, and more and more tools and libraries for neural network development become available. But IBM so far prefers to develop proprietary neural networks in its back rooms. No wonder it lags behind the latest technological developments!

Skychain will allow neural network developers to use any tools or libraries to create artificial intelligence modules for a specific diagnostic task or training dataset format. Thanks to Skychain’s open-minded approach to different technologies, it will always be at the frontier of artificial intelligence development and leave behind any closed corporate products.

As you can see, Skychain can successfully solve the three key problems that IBM Watson has run into, and which are inherent in any closed, proprietary product for the medical AI market. Skychain can also reduce the costs of all parties by a few orders of magnitude, which will make its ecosystem even more efficient and accessible for end users.

The potential of the Skychain project

Artificial intelligence for the healthcare industry is one of the most cost-effective and useful applications of neural networks. Skychain can potentially save millions of lives every year.

The annual turnover in the Skychain ecosystem can reach $100 billion or more. Skychain has every chance to become a leader in the global medical AI market (like Uber did in the taxi industry).

The Skychain project team

Skychain Global was founded by Gennady Popov. He is also the founder and CEO of a successful IT business, WSS-Consulting (http://www.wss-consulting.ru), which employs some 80 software engineers, offers two software products of its own for the enterprise market, and has about 400 major clients. WSS-Consulting has an impeccable reputation. Since it was founded 11 years ago, all of its projects have been successful, and it never had a dispute or controversy with clients. Gennady Popov also has an extensive experience as a programmer and software architect in such areas as medical automation and medical neural networks.

The Skychain project team includes experienced programmers and advisors on such issues as digital medicine, neural networks, government affairs, and business development.

Conclusions

It looks like Skychain is based only on existing, proven technologies, has a well-thought-out architecture, and doesn’t have any technological risks. Skychain project managers have also explored all the regulatory and legal issues associated with the Skychain project and obtained a confirmation that Skychain can be legally used by any parties in its ecosystem.

The major problem of the project is to create an ecosystem, bring the necessary participants, and achieve a critical mass. If that problem is successfully solved, Skychain will start developing exponentially and is likely to become a global leader whose dominant position is beyond the reach of any closed or open product.